■ vi*t 1 ■ ■ :!filii;i!lr,; ,.,.i' ^HB H ■ Mm M I !i! ,, lu!i:::;„'! i HI ■ « Pass DA Soo4 Book i B -S D 3 LORD BEACONSFIELD A STUDY BY GEORG BRANDES AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY Mrs. GEORGE STURGE NEW YORK CHARLES SCRLBNER'S SONS 743 and 745 Broadway 1880 331 ..(V5 • CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE Introduction i I. The Family '. 6 II. Boyhood 20 III. Youthful Ambition . . . .• 28 IV. Characteristics 48 V. "Vivian Grey " 63 VI. "POPANILLA" 76 VII. Travels Abroad 81 VIII. Life in London 105 IX. First Political Campaigns 118 v-" X. The "Vindication of the English Constitu- tion " 142 ^ XI. " Venetia " and " Henrietta Temple " 151 XII. The Maiden Speech 169 v^ XIII. First Attempts in Parliament 178 ^ XIV. " Young England " and " Coningsby " 190 XV. "Sybil" '......' 218 XVI. The Corn Laws and the Contest with Peel 234 "' XVII. " Tancred " 267 iii V iv Contents. CHAPTER PAGE XVIII. Disraeli as Tory Leader 291 \/ XIX. First Ministerial Office 301 XX. Disraeli as Leader of the Opposition, and his Second Ministerial Office 312 XXL Opposition, and the Reform Ministry 329 XXII. " LOTHAIR," AND FOURTH MINISTERIAL OFFICE 345 XXIII. Conclusion 358 • LC>RD BEACONSFIELD. INTRODUCTION. It is usual to draw a decided distinction between politicians and literary men. There seems to be a great gulf between the men of letters and the men of action. Every one can bring forward instances to show that distinguished savans, orators, poets, and professors have shown a want of common sense or political. ability if they have left the paths of literature for the career of a statesman. We have often seen political theorists condemned to play but a subordinate part, or to exercise but a tem- porary influence, in the parliament of their country, and humanitarian poets, like Lamartine, who have wearied the national assembly with their lyrics, and whose political career has been confined to a single great moment. As a rule, then, eminent literary ability precludes political action, and, vice versa, political action suppresses the development of lit- erary powers. Practical politicians, therefore, often 2 Lord Beaconsfield. somewhat undervalue those who come to politics fresh from the ranks of literature ; while, on the other hand, men of speculative tendencies and re- fined culture are apt to have something of the same feeling towards the men of eminent administrative or diplomatic talents; and when, like Renan, for example, they see their fine-spun political theories rejected, they find compensation for their wounded pride in the idea that shrewd and worldly wise mediocrity, in most cases, suffices for the politician. Nevertheless, there is an aspect under which lead- ing statesmen become literary characters, and fall within the sphere of the literary critic. Within cer- tain limits, every political magnate has a literary side. At any rate, there are his speeches and let- ters, and Carlyle has shown how much insight may be gained from the letters and speeches of even so illiterate a statesman as Cromwell. These produc- tions have also, for the most part, a direct literary value ; for a superior man, whatever his education may have been, generally finds expression for his thoughts in a way peculiar to himself : he is original, that is, he is in possession of the secret, often with- held from many an author by profession, of charac- terizing or caricaturing a person or subject by some mimic or graphic word. Still, in spite of the contrast between theoretical and practical men, a long series of exceptions has \ Introduction. 3 shown that literary and political talents may be found united. The political historian is sometimes transformed into the practical politician, and there are still more instances of the transition from poli- tics to history. Cicero and Thiers were at once eminent authors and statesmen, Julius Caesar and Frederick the Great were both men of literary tastes, and were at the same time politicians and military geniuses. Artistic, and still more poetic, gifts are, in the case of leading statesmen, very rare, the rarest of all. Cavour was a good speaker ; Bismarck is an excellent speaker, but he is not a born orator, nor was Cavour, who was entirely without artistic train- ing ; near the close of his life, after a visit to Tus- cany, he said, " I have discovered in myself a taste which I did not know that I possessed — the taste for art," a saying which accords with what he used to say when conversation turned to this subject : " I cannot make a sonnet, but I can make Italy." Scarcely any one would suspect Bismarck of secret poetical productions; a romance or a poem from him sounds still more improbable than a sonnet by Cavour. Yet there are so many literary productions by his hand, that a shrewd critic might try to de- lineate his character from them ; but it would be anything but exhaustive: it is only in his actions that we see the whole man ; the chief characteristics 4 Lord Beaconsfield. of a statesman such as he is are concealed from the eyes of the literary critic. It is all the more interesting for the critic, when by a solitary chance, one of the leading statesmen of Europe is also a distinguished author, a poet, and a politician, who has portrayed his own character and given us his ideas in. his works. The critic hereby gains an insight, seldom granted him, into the psychology of such a personage. Each work by his hand is an instrument which he has fabricated for us himself, wherewith we may penetrate into the workshop of his ideas ; each book that he has writ- ten is a window through which "we may look into his mind. Each train of thought which he has re- vealed to us, every character he has devised, every feeling that he has described, contains, partly, a series of confessions which he has consciously laid bare, and which must be carefully examined, as well as a series of involuntary confessions running paral- lel to them, which may be detected ; only no at- tempt should be made to extract them by force, or you would be apt only to extract what you had yourself put in. If the critic be on his guard, both as regards himself and the, author, these literary productions will afford him more than mere literary insight ; for the ideas and sentiments expressed be- long to the statesman, and not to him in his charac- ter of novelist alone ; they are the outcome of his Introduction. 5 whole character as a man, which is the common source and deepest spring of his political and liter- ary gifts. It will be my endeavour to apply a literary-criti- cal method to the present Prime Minister of Eng- land. The study of the statesman Lord Beacons- field, through the novelist Benjamin Disraeli, is attractive to me. Complete materials for the task I do not possess, as I write of a man still living, and whom I have only seen and heard from a distance, as many others have seen and heard him, and for knowledge of whom not a single special source is open to me. After careful perusal of what already exists on the subject, I hope that my method of treating it will be found new. Lord Beaconsfield's writings have not yet been made the subject of con- scientious study, unbiassed by party spirit. The portrait of the author has been painted in turn by Whigs and Tories, political foes and political friends, and hate or partisanship has mingled the colours. To me Disraeli is neither an object of ad- miration nor dislike, but simply a highly original and interesting character; and after long study of it, I have not been able to resist the desire to re- produce it on paper, CHAPTER I. THE FAMILY. It is only in royal and ancient noble families, in which the records of a long series of ancestors has been carefully preserved, that it is possible to trace with certainty the qualities inherited by an indi- vidual, and to follow the combinations and trans- formations which the mental faculties of the race have experienced in the course of time. Of the an- cestors of eminent personages we generally know too few, and of the personages themselves too little, to study the process of the formation of their char- acters in the family. Benjamin Disraeli is a descendant of one of the Jewish families compelled by the Spanish Inquisi- tion to leave the Peninsula towards the end of the fifteenth century. These families, who, although expelled from Palestine, had never wandered from the originally civilized countries of ancient times — those in the Mediterranean basin, and who had never been exposed to a rigid climate uncongenial to the race, formed for a long time the natural aris- 7 8 Lord Beacons field. tocracy of the Jewish people. They had resided, happy and respected, partly in the large cities, part- ly on their estates in Aragon, Andalusia, and Por- tugal, for the acquisition of landed property was not then denied to them. Fanaticism afterwards deprived them, by one blow, of all their rights and hopes. Lord Beaconsfield's ancestors, therefore, took refuge in the Venetian Republic, and, accord- ing to a family tradition, as soon as they trod the soil of Venice, renounced their Spanish name, and " from gratitude to the God of Jacob, who had led them through unexampled trials, and unheard-of dangers," took the name of dTsraeli, by which the family was henceforth to be known. It grew and flourished without let or hindrance for more than two hundred years. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a member of the family resolved to send his youngest son, Benjamin, to England, which seemed then to secure religious Jiberty to the Jews, and offered a favourable opening for commercial undertakings on a large scale. Religious liberty, however, was nei- ther of long standing nor complete in England. The Jews had been expelled from the country long be- fore they had been driven from Spain or Portugal. They were only tolerated from the reign of Wil- liam the Conqueror to that of Richard Cceur de Lion ; cruel persecutions then broke out, until, The Family. 9 in 1290, the accusation which we meet with during all the Middle Ages, that they used the blood of slaughtered Christian children at their Easter sacrifices, caused them to be so ill treated and plundered that they finally had to leave the coun- try. A ballad in Percy's " Old English Ballads " shows that the popular fancy was constantly occupied with the banished race ; these fellow-countrymen and murderers of the Redeemer, though the people had never seen them, became bloodthirsty monsters in their eyes ; and in English literature, Marlowe's Barabbas and Shakespeare's Shylock are memorials of the superstitious disgust and terror which they inspired up to the period of the Renaissance. The " Jew of Malta " was, to a certain extent, the pattern for his fellow in the " Merchant of Venice." There was good reason, in both cases, for laying the scene in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, for there were scarcely any Jews in England. But it was with less reason that in both dramas the southern Jew is represented as a type of cruelty ; for while on the stage in England he poisoned his daughter and whetted his knife to slay his creditor, thousands of the race, of both sexes, in Spain and Portugal, chose rather to suffer martyrdom at the stake than to abjure the faith of their fathers. The most sorely tried martyrs of that age were repre- IO Lord Be aeons field. sented on the English stage as murderers and hang- men.* It was not until the time of the Commonwealth that, protected by Cromwell himself, though not by any law, the Jews began to return to England. Un- der George II., the Minister, Lord Pelham, was fav- ourable to them, and during his ministry, Benjamin d'Israeli, the grandfather and namesake of Lord Beaconsfield, became, in the year 1748, an English citizen, without civil rights. His wife, who be- longed to a family which had suffered much from persecution, and who was vain and ambitious, was ashamed of her Jewish origin, and by an ignoble, but not uncommon association of ideas, transferred her embitterment at belonging to a despised caste from the oppressors to the oppressed. Meanwhile, her energetic husband quickly made a fortune, bought an estate, laid out a garden in the Italian style, entertained company, ate maccaroni prepared by the Venetian consul in London, played whist, sang canzonets, and, " in spite of a wife who never forgave him his name, and a son who thwarted all his plans," he lived vigorous and happy till he was nearly ninety years of age. In seeking precursors of the characteristics of the grandson, our attention is involuntarily arrested by * " Studienreisen in England," p. 272, von Jul. Rodenberg. "Curiosities of Literature," introd., by Isaac d'Israeli. The Family. II the picture which he himself has given us of his grandfather. He was a man of warm blood, san- guine, enterprising, and successful, with a tempera- ment never ruffled by disappointment, and a brain ever fertile in resources, even when one disaster fol- lowed quickly upon another. It had always been the hope of this ambitious and practical merchant, who was, in 1815, a rival of the house of Rothschild, to found a finance dynas- ty ; but this favourite scheme was frustrated by the exclusively literary tastes of his only son. Isaac d'Israeli (as he wrote his name) grew up misunder- stood by both his parents, and without ever having a good word from his mother, who foresaw a life of humiliation for her son. His first poem excited real terror in his parents' house. He was sent to school in Amsterdam, in order that he might forget his poetic fancies ; but the school-master, a negli- gent man, lived and moved in the atmosphere of the eighteenth century, and had a large library of the authors of that age, which young d'Israeli eagerly devoured. Before he was fifteen he had read Vol- taire, and tried his strength on Bayle ; at eighteen he returned to England, a disciple of Rousseau. His stay at home was but short. His father told him that he had decided to send him away again — this time to a large mercantile house at Bordeaux. The incorrigible literary son answered that he had 12 Lord Beacons field. written a great poem against trade as the ruin of mankind. Instead of Bordeaux, he contented him- self with going to Paris, where, until 1788, he spent his time in libraries and among savans. In Eng- land, he soon after began to publish poetical at- tempts, as well as those, annals, or rather anecdotes of literature, which made his name as an author, though they are remarkable neither for spirit nor accuracy. The character of the quiet man of letters and bookworm forms in many respects a marked con- trast to that of his son. At first sight, it is like the contrast between a learned Benedictine monk in his quiet cell, and a restless tribune, whose life is passed amidst the turmoil of the forum. Isaac dTsraeli was of a shy and retiring nature ; in his youth he was inclined to melancholy ; in manhood he was a collector ; as an old man he was given up to con- templation, too critical to be satisfied with his own performances, and too retiring ever to gain confi- dence in himself. Not even his growing reputation could give it him, for he best knew his own short- comings, and he felt an inward schism between him- self and the spirit of the age. In a literary point of view, he stood in England beneath a waning star ; he was a disciple of Pope and Boileau. Neverthe- less, he saw the necessity, even by reason of his early enthusiasm for Rousseau, of giving more scope and The Family. 13 freer play to nature and passion in poetry, without, on the other hand, possessing the powers of mind which would have enabled him to anticipate the coming change in English poetry. When the great naturalistic revolution in the literature of England was proclaimed and carried out by others, he was no longer young or pliant enough to take part in the movement. He lived for literature, but when he was young literature was old, and when he was old it had renewed its youth. The results of this dis- crepancy were, on the one hand, the continual secret distrust of his own powers, which is a weakness ; on the other, utter absence of vanity, always rare, and especially so in an author. Neither the weakness nor the virtue was inherited by his famous son. The simple bookworm produced a self-confident bravado, who has had both adroitness enough to conform to the powers that be, and power so to transform the tendencies of the age, that they have taken the stamp of his mind and will. Even in outward things there is a contrast be- tween father and son. Isaac dTsraeli lived in seclu- sion. When at home, although a married man, he generally spent the whole day and evening in his library ; his only diversion in London was going from one bookseller's to another. It would be scarcely possible to imagine a greater contrast than his son, who bears the complete stamp of a man of 14 Lord Beacons field. the world. But the contrast is still more striking when they are compared in their relations to politics. The father not only never took part in politics, he did not even understand them. It is clear that the son did not inherit his practical political vocation from his father. And yet nature was experimenting with Isaac d'Israeli's mind, and laying the foundations for lar- ger abilities. First, his literary studies and tastes were of great importance for his son. Nothing tends more to easy and rapid acquisition of faculty in the use of language than a literary forerunner in the race. Then some of the deepest primary facul- ties in Benjamin Disraeli's mind are obviously de- rived from his father. He was, in many respects, a genuine child of the eighteenth century, and every- thing in his son's mind which is in unison with the character and style of that age was inherited in a direct line. In a literary point of view, the father was not much more than a living lexicon of authors, but a lexicon of the times of the Encyclopaedists ; he had early laid aside the prejudices of his contem- poraries, in order to imbibe their philosophy, and was a decided, though quiet free-thinker, destitute of a creed both in the literal or intellectual sense of the word. In 1833 he published a work called " The Genius of Judaism," in which he ridicules, from a deistic standpoint, the Israelitish constitution of the The Family, 15 Mosaic laws and regulations about health and food, regarded as revealed and eternal truth. He long entertained a project of writing a history of the English free-thinkers. He was all his life an unpre- judiced sceptic, with a tendency to sarcastic wit. This keen and negative quality is also the first to show itself in the son. The mystical and roman- tic Benjamin Disraeli begins as a satirist. The first part of "Vivian Grey," " Popanilla," " Ixion in Heaven," and "The Infernal Marriage," are so many satires in the spirit of the eighteenth century. " Vivian Grey " is a type for Beaumarchais ; " Popa- nilla," a fantastic journey in Swift's style ; the family descent of the two mythological tales is to be traced to no less a person than Lucian ; they would cer- tainly not disgrace Voltaire, of whom they remind one, and might, without profanation, be set to music by Offenbach, so blasphemous are they against the gods of Greece. We should not understand any- thing of the character of Benjamin Disraeli if we overlooked the fact that even his theories and fan- tasies, which bear the strongest impress of the great romantic reaction, had been, without exception, disinfected by born scepticism and early developed critical faculty. Even in his castles in the air, you do not find the malaria arising from the Maremmas of superstition and prejudice; they are the Fata Morganas of the desert, the products, consciously 1 6 Lord Beacons field. constructed, of an arid and fiery fantasy ; by careful observation they may be easily distinguished from the structures of dreamland and reverie, which owe their existence to naive and thorough mysti- cism. Not only the critical and negative, but also the positive, romantic, Conservative tendencies of Ben- jamin Disraeli are derived from his father. The old litterateur, although Radical in a religious sense, had an instinctive liking for the Tory way of thinking. He was attracted by the house of Stuart; he laboured for five years on his work on the reign of Charles I., and received for it an Oxford diploma, with the dedication, " Optimi regis optimo vindici ; " he con- sidered his work on James I. a literary matter of conscience. In both cases it was his conviction that he was the vindicator of men who had been mis- understood, but it was not mere accident that they were both crowned heads who coveted absolute power, and were defeated in the struggle with Puri- tanism and parliament. The son has followed in his father's footsteps in these sympathies ; in sundry- passages in his writings he has broken a lance for the Stuarts ; he has adopted and defended the title of " martyr " for Charles I., and he even says, in " Sybil/' that never did a man die a hero's death for a greater cause — the cause of the Church and the poor. That these two unpopular monarchs of for- The Family. iy mer times were dissenters from the dominant relig- ion has, perhaps, conduced to ensure sympathy with authors who Sprung from a dissenting body. It is plain, however, that the younger Disraeli, however little Conservative when he first appeared as a poli- tician, was not influenced by political Radicalism in the parental home. With the Voltairean opinions which then prevailed in good society, he received, much earlier, some germs of decided Toryism, germs which were enveloped in a certain spirit of opposition to the popular conception of the politi- cal history of England, but which, under favourable circumstances, were strong enough to develop them- selves. We know too little of Disraeli's mother to judge what qualities he may have inherited from her. She died after forty-five years of married life, in her seventy-second year. He seems to consider that he derived his faculties exclusively from the paternal side. And we find in the practical energy and en- terprising character of the grandfather, the com- plement of the purely literary and contemplative nature of the father, which seems to be neces- sary to weld and polish the practical and literary gifts of a descendant of the race into a two-edged sword. As the son of Isaac d'Israeli, the future states- man was born not only with a certain range of qual- 1 8 Lord Beaconsfield. ities, but in a somewhat exceptional social posi- tion. Authors then enjoyed higher consideration in Great Britain than now, and the elder d' Israeli had a popular and respected name. Besides his col- leagues, among whom the poet and epicure Samuel Rogers was his friend, he was acquainted with many of the enlightened politicians and aristocrats of the day. The son, therefore, from his youth saw many distinguished men and women in his father's house, and the father's name opened many an aristocratic house to the son. The advantage generally enjoyed by the born aristocrat alone of having in early youth made acquaintances and connections which are otherwise the reward of long years of labour, was richly enjoyed by the young Disraeli. In his youthful works there are now and then traces that he was not unaware of the advantage of having such a father. Vivian Grey likes to hear his famous father praised ; in the " Young Duke " Disraeli dwells on the benefit, even to a boy, of having a living proof that the family blood is good for some- thing, and says : " There is no pride like the pride of ancestry, for it is a blending of all emotions." And while the author seems involuntarily to be comparing his lot with that of the aristocracy, he continues: "How immeasurably superior to the herd is the man whose father' only is famous ! Im- agine, then, the feelings of one who can trace his The Family. 19 line through a thousand years of heroes and of princes ! " * ♦ Disraeli's singular pride of ancestry goes far be- yond pride in his distinguished father ; but while his descent was necessarily only a disadvantage to him in a worldly point of view, and was the chief obsta- cle in his path, his position as his father's son gave him the start in the course offered him by destiny in the great European race for fame and distinction. * " The Young Duke," p. 88. Note. — The edition referred to throughout is Lord Beaconsfield's Novels and Tales in io vols. Great pains have been taken to find all the quotations, but as in many cases no references are given in the original work, a few very short ones have eluded me, and may not be quite verbatim. — Tr. CHAPTER II. BOYHOOD. Benjamin Disraeli himself gives 1805 as the year of his birth, but he really seems to have been born on 21st of December, 1804.* His mother, Maria Basevi, bore first a daughter, Sarah, then three sons, of whom he was the eldest. He was received into the Jewish community; but when his father afterwards separated himself from it — if report speaks truly — he gave his friend Samuel Rogers leave to take him to church and have him baptized. Rogers was totally indifferent to religion, but it seemed to him a pity— so it is said — that this fine, intelligent boy should be excluded by his creed from the most important civil rights and Jiighest social advantages. Anyhow, the baptism took place in the parish of St. Andrews, on 31st of July, 1817. In the church registers, Benjamin Disraeli is spoken of as " about twelve years old." He was sent to a private school at Winchester, and was afterwards placed for a short time in a * Picciotto : " Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History," p. 300. 20 Boyhood. 21 lawyer's office. All desired information as to his inner life in his boyhood and early youth may be found in his novels. We learn from " Vivian Grey " and "Contarini Fleming," which contain unmis- takable autobiographical elements relating to these years, what we should expect, that in this early period of Disraeli's life humiliations abounded as well as triumphs. In both books the hero is the de- cided favourite among the boys, from his abilities, his boldness, and his talents as a leader, and is ac- knowledged, so to speak, unanimously, as the clev- erest and most original boy in the school. His English essays and verses are admired and copied. In short, he is the popular hero, while he regards his schoolfellows as beings whom he is resolved to rule. But behind all this popularity, the possibility of a general hatred is concealed, not only the envy which always pursues success, but fierce ill will of a special kind, brutal in its origin, and cruel in its ex- ercise— in a word, the hatred of race. When the usher's dislike to Vivian Grey first breaks out, he uses the expression, " seditious stranger ; " and no sooner has the word been given, than his schoolfel- lows join in with, " No stranger ! no stranger ! " * This expression does not find its motive in the book, for in no sense of the word can Vivian Grey * "Vivian Grey," p. 9. LC 22 Lord Beaconsfield. be called a stranger in the school. The word has obviously crept into the novel from some reminis- cence of the author's childhood ; only it was not the word used in reality, which more decidedly pointed to a foreign nationality, and sounded far more con- temptuous. On this subject, "Contarini Fleming" comes still nearer the truth, in which the hero, with his south- ern appearance and Italian descent, finds himself unhappy among his fair half-brothers in the north. " They were called my brothers, but Nature gave the lie to the reiterated assertion. There was no similitude between us. Their blue eyes, their flaxen hair, and their white visages, claimed no kindred with my Venetian countenance. Wherever I moved I looked around me, and beheld a race different from myself. There was no sympathy between my frame and the rigid clime whither I had been brought to live." * If we add to the Venetian type the still deeper Israelitish stamp, and to the national contrast the religious prejudice as it existed in an English school in 1820, we shall be able to form an idea of Dis- raeli's feelings when he emerged from his father's house into boy's estate, and found that he was not looked upon as an equal, but as a " foreigner " of * '■ Contarini Fleming," p. 5. Boyhood. 23 lower caste. Such an impression in those early- years is one of the deepest which can be received — one of those never effaced from sensitive and aristo- cratic minds. To feel yourself disgraced without being conscious of any fault ! To be looked down upon because of your appearance, your father, your people, your religion, your race ! A poor boy among rich ones, an illegitimate child among legitimate, a Catholic among Protestants, a deformed boy among well-grown schoolfellows, feels himself, each in his own way, thrust aside and humiliated. But a Jew- ish boy in a Christian school of the old-fashioned sort felt something of what all these feel put to- gether. He learnt for the first time that he was a Jew, and all that the name implies. He discovered that he was not reckoned as one of the people among whom he lived, had no part in the deeds of their forefathers or in their history, but was an iso- lated being: and yet was constantly thrown with others, whom he did not know and had never seen before ; who regarded him as ugly, nay, even repul- sive ; to whom his mode of speaking was ridiculous, nay, even repugnant ; and who pointed at him the ringer of scorn. In the reading lessons, a Jew was inevitably a ridiculous, vulgar, or mean and avari- cious person, a cheat, a usurer, or a coward. And in the same class, or one close by, there was sure to be another boy of Jewish origin, whose countenance 24 Lord Beacons field, was branded with the mark of slavery, abject and degraded to the last degree, made to be a scapegoat and clown ; and at every blow struck at this poor wretch, he felt his own cheek burn, and every das- tardly act of his was felt to be his own shame. Even when, by severe struggles, he had won comparative immunity for himself, he had not the slightest power to protect his brother Jew, or to secure this carica- ture of himself from general contempt and brutality. And why should he suffer all this ? Not at home, but at school did he find the answer. His people, who once in far distant ages were the blest and cho- sen people, were now cursed and rejected, were suf- fering the penalty for a crime committed by their fathers nearly two thousand years ago. O igno- miny! Unconsciously and against his will, to be- long to this despised and accursed nation ! Was not his grandmother at Enfield in the right in denying her kinship with them ; and was it not the most nat- ural thing in the world to hate them himself, and thus to acquire the right to be considered an excep- tion? But this question could not be seriously enter- tained ; for see. all these scornful looks, these mock- ing, disdainful glances ; listen to this calling of names behind your back, to these challenges which must be accepted and outbidden. In both the above-named youthful novels of Disraeli, the hero Boyhood. 25 has in his school days a great decisive fight with a boy put forward by the hatred of a whole clique. In both he considers that a great wrong has been done him, and in both he takes revenge. But in his method of doing it, the character of the author is revealed no less plainly than that of the hero. Vi- vian Grey revenges himself on the faithless com- rades who have left him in the lurch with a tyran- nical teacher, by a method projected in cold blood and relentlessly carried out. In the next half-year he gains favour with this teacher, employs him first as an instrument of torture for the other boys, and in the end gives him up to them as a victim, while he keeps them off from himself with a loaded pistol. He leaves the school, saying that if he could devise a new and exquisite method of torture he would ap- ply it to this teacher, who was the first to apply the word " stranger" to him. Contarini Fleming re- venges himself with less forethought, but not the less completely. He does it in a boxing match with a much bigger boy ; he falls upon him like a wild beast, and throws him to the ground. Consider the following passage : — " He was up again in a mo- ment ; and indeed, I would not have waited for their silly rules of mock conduct, but have destroyed him in his prostration. But he was up again in a moment." * * " Contarini Fleming," p. 37. 26 Lord Beaconsfield. How characteristic is this turn ! Contarini does not respect the accepted rules of the combat, any- more than Vivian shrinks from deception as a means ; thirst for revenge in both cases is so keen that it causes all other considerations to be forgot- ten. Read Contarini's account of it : " Again I flew upon him. He fought with subtle energy, but he was like a serpent with a tiger. I fixed upon him : my blows told with the rapid pre- cision of machinery. His bloody visage was not to be distinguished. I believe he was terrified by my frantic air. " I would never wait between the rounds. I cried out in a voice of madness for him to come on. There was breathless silence. They were thunder- struck. . . . Each time that he came forward I made the same dreadful spring, beat down his guard, and never ceased working upon his head, un- til at length my fist seemed to enter his very brain ; and, after ten rounds, he fell down quite blind. I never felt his blows ; I never lost my breath. " He could not come to time. I rushed forward ; I placed my knee upon his chest. i I fight no more/ he faintly cried. " ' Apologize ! ' I exclaimed — ' apologize ! ' He did not speak. " l By heavens, apologize ! ' I said, i or I know not what I shall do.' Boyhood. 2 J " ' Never ! ' he replied. " I lifted up my arm. Some advanced to inter- fere. ' Off ! ' I shouted. ' Off, off ! * I seized the fallen chief, rushed through the gate, and dragged him like Achilles through the mead. At the bot- tom there was a dunghill. . Upon it I flung the half- inanimate body. " I strolled away to one of my favourite haunts. I was calm and exhausted ; my face and hands were smeared with gore. I knelt down by the side of the stream, and drank the most delicious draught that I had ever quaffed." * The sweetness of the draught was in the revenge — complete revenge. One sees the natural charac- ter of this first brood of Disraeli's boys. There is not one drop of the milk of human kindness in their blood — no higher law than an eye for an eye in their souls. It seems as if these young fellows had suffered too cruelly in early childhood to be able to restore their equanimity in any other way than by procuring inviolability for themselves by methods equally cruel, and by quaffing long and repeated draughts of revenge. * " Contarini Fleming," p. 37. CHAPTER III. YOUTHFUL AMBITION. Benjamin Disraeli was, by the general consent of his contemporaries, as a boy and youth, very handsome. He had long, raven-black locks ; eyes sparkling with spirit and intelligence ; a good nose ; a mouth round which there was a restless, nervous play ; and a complexion striking from its romantic paleness. He was everywhere found attractive, and often petted both by men and women. Men were delighted with his shrewd questions and witty re- plies ; and from women he seems to have early learnt what he said in his first book, when scarcely twenty years of age, that the only rival which a clever man has to fear is a precocious boy. What was going on meanwhile in the restless mind which was revealed by this expressive ex- terior? Wild dreams, passionate affections, long- ings for knowledge, and paroxysms of thirst for learn- ing. Disraeli shows himself in his earliest works so amazingly precocious in worldly wisdom, in fashion, and in penetrating, sarcastic observation, that an inattentive reader might take him for a purely out- 28 Youthful Ambition, 29 ward-bound character, who had, so to speak, over- leapt that first stage of development, in which a youth is self-engrossed, searches deep into his own heart, weighs his capabilities in secret, and tries the elasticity and extent of his powers. But he could not really have escaped any of it ; it only appears so because he passed through all these stages with great rapidity as a boy, while with many Germanic natures it occupies the first lustrum of manhood. Neither vague dreams, fantastic visions of the future, doubt, nor lassitude were spared him. " Contarini Fleming " is witness that he was acquainted with it all ; but the result of the ordeal was as favourable as it was rapidly attained. His brain was fertile, and gave birth to dreams, fancies, schemes, intrigues, which in their turn gave birth to new ones. He was full of courage ; he was not only undaunted, he sought for adventures, and the intriguer in his brain was the born ally of the adventurer in his breast. The result of his self-examination was absolute confidence in his powers and in his future. Forti nihil difficile, the words which Disraeli inscribed upon his banners at his first election, were, long before they were formulated into a motto, the watchword which coursed with the blood in his veins. This confidence in himself is a feature of his character. While gifted people, doubtful of them- 30 Lord Beaconsfield. selves have to contend with an ever-recurring dis- couragement, and characters in which the moral element predominates are always trying to make new conquests in order to gain self-esteem, and cannot feel it before they have earned it, young Disraeli felt sure of his abundant resources, lost no time in Hstening to the moral lectures of the inward monitor, allowed life and destiny — which with its smiles and frowns, soon seemed to him the most impressive of moralists — to take care of his educa- tion, and, from his first entrance on man's estate, he felt himself to be an object of respect to himself and of value to others. Wherever a fund of talent exists, there is a cer- tain force which impels it to develop itself, and pre- vents the individual from standing still by continual excitement of the faculties. The love of gain, of acquisition, was a force of this kind with Disraeli's immediate ancestors; love of action and zeal for reform are frequent forms of it with persons of lit- erary or political tastes. Let us inquire what was the original motive power in his case. There is a very convenient psychological-critical method which has often been applied to the present Prime Minister of England, which consists of identi- fying him with one of the creations of his own brain, and boldly ascribing to him every sentiment and every dishonourable thought of this character ; but Youthful Ambition. 31 criticism requires more delicate instruments than such biographers employ. It is not in the rough outlines of a work, still less in the moral quality, greater or less, of the charac- ters described, that criticism finds vouchers for the ego of the author ; but in casual expressions, turns of thought which serve as exemplifications ; in the choice of metaphors ; in lyrical outbursts, which do not belong to the course of the narrative, but which will make way for themselves because they fill the soul of the writer, and he is unable to restrain them. Suppose, for example, that an author has been early struck with the impossibility of knowing the human soul from books, and wishes to illustrate the opinion by instances ; we may be sure that the first examples which come to his lips will be those with which his own experience has furnished him. Dis- raeli exemplifies it as follows: — "A man may be constantly searching into the hearts of his fellow men in his study, and yet have no idea of the power of ambition or the strength of revenge." Ambition is the first example that occurs to him ; and it is this passion which, in all his early writings, is the source of the joys and sorrows of all the characters. In " Vivian Grey " he says : " For a moment he mused over Power; but then he, shuddering, shrank from the wearing anxiety, the consuming care, the eternal vigilance, the constant contrivance, the ago- 32 Lord Beacons field. nizing suspense, the distracting vicissitudes of his past career. Alas ! it is our nature to sicken from our birth after some object of unattainable felicity, to struggle through the freshest years of our life in an insane pursuit after some indefinite good, which does not even exist ! . . . We dream of immortal- ity until we die. Ambition ! at thy proud and fatal altar we whisper the secrets of our mighty thoughts, and breathe the aspirations of our inexpressible de- sires. A clouded flame licks up the offering of our ruined souls, and the sacrifice vanishes in the sable smoke of Death." * One hears both the soaring flight and the melan- choly of ambition in this lament. Will it succeed ? Will my powers be equal to it? We find these questionings now and then in Disraeli's earliest works, but far more frequently" as to the issue than as to his own powers. In " The Young Duke " there is a page where the narrator suddenly steps out of the book, and, with youthful want of self- restraint, entertains the reader with an account of the place where he writes, of himself, and his inner life: " Amid the ruins of eternal Rome I scribble pages lighter than the wind, and feed with fancies volumes which will be forgotten ere I can hear that they are " Vivian Grey," p. 356. Youthful Ambition, 33 even published. Yet am I not one insensible to the magic of my memorable abode, and I could pour my passion o'er the land ; but I repress my thoughts, and beat their tide back to their hollow caves. . . . " For I am one, though young, yet old enough to know Ambition is a demon ; and I fly from what I fear. And Fame has eagle wings, and yet she mounts not so high as man's desires. . . . " Could we but drag the purple from the hero's heart ; could we but tear the laurel from the poet's throbbing brain, and read their doubts, their dan- gers, their despair, we might learn a greater lesson than we shall ever acquire by musing over their ex- ploits or their inspiration. Think of unrecognized Caesar, with his wasting youth, weeping over the Macedonian's young career ? Could Pharsalia com- pensate for those withering pangs ? " View the obscure Napoleon starving in the streets of Paris ! What was St. Helena to the bit- terness of such existence ? The visions of past glory might illumine even that dark imprisonment ; but to be conscious that his supernatural energies might die away without creating their miracles : can the wheel or the rack rival the torture of such a sus- picion ? " * * " Young Duke," p. 82. 2* 34 Lord Beaconsfield. This direct address is out of all connection with the book, and forms, with its pathetic lyrical flight, a remarkable contrast to the fashionable, and, now and then, affected frivolous tone of the novel. The words were keenly felt, and it was hard to suppress them. As one who is possessed of some secret can- not sometimes deny himself the satisfaction of giv- ing a hint of it in some way not observed by others, though his interest is deeply involved in its conceal- ment, the young author apparently could not refrain from producing an effect by tearing the mask of the elegant author from his face in one passage of his book, and suddenly disclosing to the reader his real visage, furrowed by the sufferings and temptations of ambition. Ambition as such is not immoral ; it is in itself neither moral nor immoral, but natural, and it only receives a moral impress from its means and ends. It varies according to whether its object is chiefly fame or power. In Disraeli's case, desire for fame and love of power were both direct products of his self-esteem, though they were scarcely of equal strength. In case of need, he would rather have contented himself with power without fame, than with fame without power. It appears to me that if he had had his choice, whether to be the powerful president of a secret tribunal, or a Tasso feted at Ferrara, he would have chosen the former. But the Youthful Ambition. 35 two objects have certainly never been separated in his aspirations, although he felt his relations towards them to be different. He saw fame before him as if he could grasp it, extort it by his talents ; there was, therefore, no need to gain over or flatter any one ; he would, perhaps, attain it best by challenges on all sides. Power was far off, very far, and was only to be attained step by step ; the path was slippery and tortuous; but he was firmly resolved to spare no pains, to shrink from no humiliation, no trial of pa- tience, that might lead to the goal. And the goal was an actual one. While honour is in its very na- ture relative, indefinite in quantity, and you may always long for more, the power to which a man may hope to attain is something definite. Young Disraeli longed at all events for the highest power, and if, with his southern blood and fantastic tenden- cies in boyhood, we may conjecture that he dreamed of dark conspiracies and secret societies, before long the brilliant and safe position of a prime minister presented itself to him as the real object of desire. No sooner did he begin to write than he began to portray prime ministers, and with equal imaginative faculty and political sagacity. The two novels in which they occur, " Vivian Grey" and " Contarini Fleming," both bear the stamp of psychological biographies, and each is the complement of the other. They contain forecasts 36 Lord Beaconsfield. of his own training, both as a politician and a nov- elist. Vivian Grey, the hero of the earlier work, is a young man inclined to politics, with talents for authorship ; Contarini Fleming, on the contrary, is an imaginative youth, with talents for politics ; both have a passion for power and fame. But that to Disraeli power appears to be the chief good, is be- trayed most clearly in the career of the novelist, in which we should not, a priori, have expected to find love of power so strongly accented. The task which, according to his own statement, Disraeli set himself in " Contarini Fleming," was to portray the development of a poetic character ; he aimed at giving us his " Wilhelm Meister," with this difference — that his hero was to mature for poetry, and Goethe's for the realities of life. Am- bition is often a part of the poetic nature, but it may be latent, and only betray itself in discreet and quiet ways. Goethe's " Meister " is only ambitious in this way. But let us hear the poet in Disraeli describe himself as a schoolboy. " Indeed, exist- ence was intolerable, and I should have killed my- self had I not been supported by my ambition, which now each day became more quickening, so that the desire of distinction and of astound- ing action raged in my soul ; and when I re- collected that, at the soonest, many years must elapse before I could realize my ideas, I gnashed Youthful Ambition. 37 my teeth in silent rage, and cursed my exist- ence." * Years go by, and the poet, whose father is a dis- tinguished politician, has suffered his first defeats and won his first spurs. In moments of self-confi- dence, he saw his genius and destiny struggling for life or death, and the struggle ended with his " sit- ting on a brilliant throne, and receiving the laurel wreath from an enthusiastic people." But politics are always almost as attractive to him as literature ; through his father's influence he is appointed to the post of under secretary of state, and gains a decided triumph in the councils of the nation by his decision and presence of mind. Would it not be said, on reading the following outburst, that this poet, con- trary to the intention of the author, showed more political than poetical ambition, and a greater de- sire for power than for a famous name ? — " I felt all my energies. I walked up and down the hall in a frenzy of ambition, and I thirsted for action. There seemed to me no achievement of which I was not capable, and of which I was not ambitious. In imagination I shook thrones and founded empires. I felt myself a being born to breathe in an atmos- phere of revolution." t * " Contarini Fleming," p. 33. \ Ibid., p. 176. 38 Lord Beacons field. At this moment his father comes to him and prophesies that he will become prime minister in the country in which they live (Scandinavia), and perhaps still more than that, which may mean in a country of more importance. The father is mis- taken in his son's powers, for he soon returns to lit- erature ; but the mistake seems to us only too natu- ral, for we do not often find a thirst like this for power and action in a poet, and by endowing him with these qualities Disraeli has unconsciously be- trayed how universal he considers them. In the novel, the father and son discuss the question whether deeds or poetry, the fame of a statesman or the fame of a poet, is to be preferred, and the son decides for poetry ; but it can scarcely be doubted that it is the father who expresses Disraeli's own opinion when he declares for the opposite view. In his preface to " Curiosities of Literature," by his own father, Disraeli afterwards said that an author may have a deeper influence over his contempora- ries than a statesman, and that a book may be a greater thing than a battle or a congress. This was true, and it was his honest opinion ; yet he did not mean or feel that it was true in his own case. He felt far more deeply what he made Contarini Flem- ing's father say, that a poet's lot was a sad one, and fame after death a poor compensation for the perse- cutions and deprivations in which the lives of the Youthful Ambition. 39 greatest poets have been passed. He early prom- ised himself not to be content with posthumous fame. He never seriously doubted that action was above writing poetry, and Count Fleming speaks from his own heart when he says : " Would you rather have been Homer or Julius Caesar, Shake- speare or Napoleon? No one doubts. Moralists may cloud truth with every possible adumbration of cant, but the nature of our being gives the lie to all their assertions. We are active beings, and our sympathy, above all other sympathies, is with great action." * I have said that by endowing a poet in his youth with love of power, he betrayed his belief in the universality of the passion. Twelve years later, when he knew better than to give the public any picture of himself than such as would serve his ends, he writes again : " Fame and power are the objects of all men." He calls " thirst for power and desire for fame " the forces which call us out of social ob- scurity, and ambition the " divinity or the demon to which we all offer so many sacrifices." Power and fame are certainly not the objects of all men ; they were not the objects of Franklin, Kant, or John Stuart Mill. It was not thirst for these things which called men like Spinoza or Newton from ob- * " Contarini Fleming," p. 155. 40 Lord Beaconsfield. scurity into immortality. All great men have not offered sacrifice to ambition. Washington sacrificed nothing to it, nor has Garibaldi. But in utterances like these the speaker unconsciously gives us contri- butions to his own psychology. The first motive of his actions, then, was to raise himself, to quench the raging thirst for distinction. The source of this thirst was a born love of domin- ion, of ruling and influencing other men. A saying of Disraeli's in " Tancred " refers to this tendency when he is defending an ambitious Syrian emir from the charge of having only selfish aims : " Men cer- tainly must be governed, whatever the principle of the social system, and Fakredeen felt born with a predisposition to rule." * All depends on what it is that is sacrificed to this passion. And there can be no doubt that Disraeli soon came to the conclusion that it would not do to bargain and haggle too scrupulously. He was not made for a Stoic. Even his Vivian Grey stumbles, in his ambitious reflections, on the problem how it happens that so many great minds are thrust aside and misunderstood, and solves it by saying that these rare characters are too much engrossed with themselves to be able to study others. The cool and sagacious youth draws the following conclusion * " Tancred," p. 369. Youthful Ambition. 41 from it : — " Yes ; we must mix with the herd ; we must enter into their feelings; we must humour their weaknesses ; we must sympathize with the sor- rows that we do not feel, and share the merriment of fools." * I certainly should not apply these words to the author himself, if I had not found the same idea ex- pressed in writings in which he speaks in his own name. Even in these he considers it justifiable to advocate views and sentiments which you do not share, in order to retain power, and to guide a move- ment which might otherwise have worse issues. In " The Crisis Examined," 1834, he says: "The peo- ple have their passions, and it is even the duty of public men occasionally to adopt sentiments with which they do not sympathize, because the people must have leaders." f A duty it never is, and it can only be justified in cases of urgent necessity ; but if words such as these are not necessarily evidences of want of morality, they are undoubtedly the language of love of power. That a man like Benjamin Disraeli was ambitious is only the secret of a Polichinello, a fact too gener- ally acknowledged to need proof. But the term " ambitious " is but an empty word ; it only expresses * " Vivian Grey," p. 18. f " Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield," vol. I. p. 121. 42 Lord Be aeons fie Id. the abstract quality in which everything depends on the quantity and the method. The study of the man's early writings shows to what extent and in what way he was ambitious. Ambitious, then, he was. And with this irresisti- ble longing for power and mastery, he saw moun- tains of obstacles rise up between him and his desires. He was unknown, he was a commoner, without influential connections. England was a thoroughly aristocratic country, and full of preju- dices, and he was — the son of a Jew. He had, it is true, been by accident formally introduced into the Christian Church, and thus the absolute obstacle to his political career was removed. But the baptized Jew was no nearer the goal than the unbaptized, the tokens of race and hatred of the race remained. One born a Jew the prime minister of a great Power ! It was absurd ; unheard of, since Joseph ruled Egypt as the favourite of Pharaoh. England was ruled by aristocrats, and what was he? A pariah. A pariah — but why? And here query after query arose. Was, then, this mixed population of Saxons and Normans, among whom he had first seen the light, of purer blood than he ? Oh no, he was descended in a direct line from one of the old- est races in the world, from that rigidly separate and unmixed Bedouin race, who had developed a Youthful Ambition, 43 high civilization at a time when the inhabitants of England were going half naked, and eating acorns in their woods. He was of pure blood ; and yet, strange to say, they regarded his race as of lower caste, and, nevertheless, they had adopted most of the laws and many of the customs, which consti- tuted the peculiarity of this caste in their Arabian home. They had appropriated all the religion and all the literature of his fathers. They had acknowl- edged this literature to be sacred, inspired by God Himself, and this religion to be a revelation which might be supplemented, but could never be abol- ished. They divided their time by Jewish methods. They rested on the Sabbath, in accordance with a Jewish law, and it was observed by them scarcely less literally or fanatically than in the ancient land of the race. They considered it to be a virtue, even a duty, continually to study the history of his ancestors, and taught it to their children before teaching them the history of their own country. Week by week they sang in their churches the hymns, laments, and praises of the Jewish poets ; and finally, they worshipped the Son of a Jewish woman as their God. Yet, nevertheless, they ex- cluded with disdain from their society and their parliament, as if they were the offscouring of the earth, the race to which they owed their festivals, their psalms, their semi-civilization, their religion, 44 Lord Beaconsfield. and their God. He racked his brains. He was not a child who took legends for realities ; he was a sharp-sighted youth, brought up by a sceptical sa- vant in an eighteenth century library, who, when a boy, had learnt French out of Voltaire. His father had himself put the works of the great Frenchman into his hands, because, as a boy, he seemed dis- posed to lose himself in fantasies ; and he had de- voured the hundred volumes, had read them with laughter, with profound admiration, and bitter tears over the fate of humanity. It had been a revela- tion to him ; the world's history had been transacted before his eyes — pedants and priests and tyrants ; the folio volumes by blockheads, the funeral bells of inquisitors, the prisons of kings, and the wearisome, stupid system of deceit and misgovernment which had so long sat as a nightmare on the breast of na- ture— in a word, all our ignorance, all our weakness, and all our folly presented themselves to his view. He did not need to ask himself whether orthodoxy came forth unscathed from this long indictment against the enemies of thought. But what was that to him? Those who despised the Jewish race were always just those who accepted revelation, while the Voltaireans had always pleaded for toleration. Be- sides, he did not look at the question at all from this dogmatic point of view. He took a practical view of it. The Asiatic race to which he belonged Youthful Ambition. 45 had in an intellectual sense conquered Europe, and the quarters of the world peopled by Europeans. Northern Europe worshipped the Son of a Jewish mother, and gave Him a place at the right hand of the Creator ; southern Europe worshipped besides, as Queen of Heaven, a Jewish maiden ; this was all the difference between the two religious parties who agreed in contemning his people. He was proud of his descent from a race which, scattered, banished, martyred, plundered, and humiliated for thousands of years, by Egyptian Pharaohs, Assyrian kings, Roman emperors, Scandinavian crusaders, Gothic chiefs, and holy inquisitors, had still held their own, had kept their race pure, and remained to this day irrepressible, inexhaustible, indispensable, full of en- ergy and genius. When he fell into this train of thought, it seemed to him as if he were living through the whole history of the race, and as if the whole race lived in him — all the departed children of Israel in him, Disraeli ; all those who had fallen asleep, those who had died in obscure misery, in- sulted, tortured, burnt at the stake — they lived in him and should receive satisfaction through him. And what was it, then, with which this people were reproached now ? With rejecting Christ and hating Him. He hate Christ ? — the fairest flower and the eternal pride of the Jewish race, the son of the chosen royal family of the chosen people ! Nay, no 46 Lord Beaconsfield. one hates his own flesh and blood, and he was the kinsman of Him whom his race was accused of hating. He, too, sprang from a noble family among the people which was the aristocracy of man- kind. Dreams ! Idle dreams ! He was really a pariah among the aristocracy of his country — aristocracy as they were called. Fine aristocrats, indeed ! ancient nobility ! A few of the most distinguished of them could, with difficulty, trace their pedigree back for eight hundred years to a troop of Norman knights, whose fathers were wreckers, Baltic pirates, to whom the elements of civilization had' been com- municated by priests who taught them the religion of Asia ; and to whom did the rest of the great families owe their wealth and their nobility? The rank was often derived from some cunning cham- berlain, who contrived to perform eye-service for some tyrannical king ; or to some former club-house waiter, who had bought the title of baron, and the wealth had mostly one and the same source — plun- der ; only with this difference, that some fortunes had been made by sacrilege and plunder of monas- teries during the Reformation so called, others by draining India during the so-called colonization of that country.* * " Sybil," pp. ii, 89 ; " Tancred," p. 427. Youthful Ambition, 47 Arid now to have to exclaim with the hero of his first book : " ' Curse my lot ! that the want of a few rascal counters, and the possession of a little rascal blood, should mar my fortunes ! ' " * * " Vivian Grey," p. 18. CHAPTER IV. CHARACTERISTICS. Let us imagine this passionate impulse to make way for himself, the first symptom of which is al- ways a desire to attract attention, grafted upon a genuine Oriental temperament, and we shall not be surprised that Disraeli first exhibited himself in the curious character of a dandy. The age had something to do with it. He was a youth when George IV. was king, of whose pink suits and white silk waistcoats his contemporaries read long descriptions, and whose inventions in shoe-buckles and hat shapes were as much discussed as the inventions of mitrailleuses by other monarchs. And Disraeli entered the literary circles of good society at the time when Byron, not long before his death, was the idol of the clever English youth, and appeared to them to fee poetry incarnate, as well as a model of anti-Philistinism. But Byron was the first instance in England of a mixture of romanticism which set all rules at defiance, and of coxcombry dictating the fashion. He had almost an equal de- sire to write verses which should be on everybody's 43 Characteristics, 49 tongue, and to excite astonishment by social ca- prices at variance with all the usages of society, and to introduce new ones. If George IV. and he had nothing else in common, they were agreed in their admiration of Beau Brummell, the lion among the London dandies ; and many of 'Disraeli's writings bear witness to the deep impression which had been made upon him in former years by Byron's person and poetry. His ideal of life at that period may be characterized by an expression of his own in one of his early works, " half passion, half fashion." * Noth- ing could be further from his thoughts than to adopt Goethe's well-known saying about good society: " It is called good when it affords no occasion for the least romance." f On the contrary, the life of the elegant world had for him all the poetry which it generally has for those originally excluded from it, and all the charm which it has for those to whom it is an object of ambition. This precociously pol- ished youth — who did not for a moment doubt that he was, in mind and native nobility, the equal of lords and dukes, nay, rather their superior — felt himself instinctively attracted by the flutterings of the " golden youth," in the sunshine of fortune, and he early made it a speciality to describe high society. * " The Young Duke," p. 224. f . . . maim nennt sie die gute Wenn sie gum kleinsten Gedicht keine Gelegenheit giebt. 3 5